Monitor: US press comment on the peace agreement signed with Serbia

All the News of the World

WE ARE concerned that this administration may repeat the mistakes of Bosnia, where the fighting was halted by making Milosevic the West's strategic partner in implementing a peace settlement. The Kosovo agreement may do the same: Serbian spokesmen are already claiming that the deal reaffirms Belgrade's sovereignty over Kosovo and authorizes an international troop deployment only "under UN auspices". These are more than face-savers for Milosevic: they are achievements that may well strengthen him domestically, much as Saddam Hussein was strengthened by surviving Desert Storm.

USA Today

KOSOVO SHOULD not have been NATO's defining moment, because it has defined NATO in a way that endangers the alliance and sets a discomfiting precedent for much of the rest of Europe's eastern half. Collective intervention earlier to keep the peace, when there was a peace to keep, backed up by a credible threat of force would have worked. This was no victory. It was a hurtful and costly lesson. Let's remember the difference.

Boston Globe

AS FAR as Milosevic is concerned, this agreement is vague on the prosecution of the war-crimes charges against him. The critical - and uncertain - element is his intent to cooperate. The triumphalism that greeted last week's deal was misplaced. Any triumphalism now would be premature, to say the least.

New York Post

THE ONE useful purpose Slobodan Milosevic can still serve is as a symbol to deter others, whether caged on his own Elba or swinging gently in the breeze. Such a fate would be a salutary symbol of the end courted by those who would disturb the peace of Europe. But to actually set a new course, to change an outmoded policy, to think, and to act on the basis of that thought ... all that would require actual statesmen, not the poseurs who now prate before the television cameras while a hard-won peace may yet be nibbled away.

Arkansas Democrat Gazette